


They Never Got Me

by superblackmarket



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Alexandria Safe Zone, M/M, Post Season 5
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-06
Updated: 2015-06-10
Packaged: 2018-04-03 05:23:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 11,606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4088539
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/superblackmarket/pseuds/superblackmarket
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Behind the walls of Alexandria, things have soured between Rick and Daryl. Daryl will never be civilized and respectable enough and nobody's really talking about what happened while he was gone. So he finds himself on the run again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Charlie Don't Surf

**Author's Note:**

> (Welcome to a completely plotless and pointless story that owes its existence to early morning insomnia.)

_The Widow Douglas she took me for her son, and allowed she would sivilize me, but it was rough living in the house all the time, considering how dismal regular and decent the widow was in all her ways. When I couldn’t stand it no longer I lit out._

\- _The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_

 

 

“You smoke too much.”

Daryl raised his eyebrows, glaring down at the former congresswoman. “Perk a’the new world, lady.” She wasn’t _ma’am_ anymore, not since that blood-drenched evening a few weeks ago that bid farewell to the rule of, well, rules, and heralded the return of something stronger, fiercer.

“What is?” She looked small and shrunken, and he reminded himself that she was a widow now.

“’Member all them signs, ‘No Smoking Anywhere?’” he said.

Deanna nodded. “When I was in the Senate, I drew up a bill that-”

“Well, they’re all gone now,” Daryl said. “So there ya go.”

She frowned and he took a long drag to seal his point, but he wasn’t dick enough to blow the smoke in her direction, cos she was a widow and all. The tobacco was stale but he held it in his lungs long as possible to remind himself vice was a luxury and not a prerogative for pissing off tight-assed former congresswomen.

Deanna folded her arms and regarded him, perched up there on the porch railing with his smokes and his engine grease and the tear in his jeans revealing a scarred and scabbed-over knee. Used to be, image was a thing that had him skulking round dark corners and reluctant to look decent folk in the eye. Then it was a thing he forgot about cos it stopped mattering round the time Hershel’s farm burned and back at the prison no one gave a damn what he looked like so long as he kept them safe in their beds and supplied food for their table and maybe they loved him for it, in the end. But this place, it took him back, the stares and the whispers and even the laughter as he stumped through the gates, swinging a dead possum by its long bald tail. _I understand, I’m an outcast too,_ Aaron had said, or something like it, and he’d snorted in disbelief, _boy, you aint got a fucken clue._ But Deanna wasn’t in charge anymore, and under the new regime he could flaunt it, his outsiderness, he could lean back legs spread insouciantly wide and smoke his cigarettes and smirk down at her, secure in the knowledge that _you people’d be dead without us._

But she wasn’t a politician for nothing, her, and she still had a trick up her sleeve. “You and Rick…” she began, and let it dangle there, barbed and innocuous.

His pulse sped up but _no way she don’t know what she’s talking about_ and he forced himself to keep his posture loose and blow a smoke ring before he said “What?” with a healthy measure of indifference.

“I notice you’re sleeping inside now,” she said.

“And?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Nothing.” And she pulled her jacket tighter around her and continued down the street toward her house.

He stared after her with narrowed eyes. Lady was just trying to get a rise outta him, unless she had some kinda video camera hidden in the upstairs bedroom she wasn’t but whistlin in the dark, testing out the loyalties of Rick’s people, and he’d be damned if she found any cracks. She could study him all she liked. She wouldn’t find a damn thing.

The door opened and Michonne slipped out to join him. “Coward,” he grunted, he’d felt her presence behind the curtain for a while now.

Michonne’s teeth flashed in her dark face. “You handle the dragon just fine,” she said. The sight of her in her constable uniform still put him off-balance; made it hard to remember all those weeks spent chasing the Governor through the woods, when they’d both reverted back to the same primordial _hunt sleep fight eat hunt again_ routine and lived wild. But these days Michonne wore her katana strapped to her back again, so not everything was changed.

He dropped his cigarette butt into the petunia bed. As if on cue, Deanna glanced back over her shoulder and shook her head.

Michonne grinned. “She’ll get you sivilized yet, Huck Finn.”

“She aint no Widow Douglas,” he said, staring out vacantly before him. He was restless and outdoor-cat itchy again. Recruiting had been suspended and he saw the good sense in that, with those Wolf bastards sniffing round outside the walls, but Christ he was bored, with nothing to do but oil his motorcycle and polish his crossbow and teach lily-handed Alexandrians how to fire their guns. “Where’s Rick?” he said.

“Out on his beat,” Michonne said and he snickered, not much of a beat when you had a one-way street in a one-horse town with a bunch of one-way people lagging around, but if Rick’s authority went down easier dressed in a familiar costume, let them have their little charade.

“They’re trying, Daryl,” Michonne told him. “They have a lot of catching up to do.”

Down the street, Deanna was opening her door, still unlocked and unsecured, after all this damn time, and walking inside. Daryl shook his head and spat over the railing. “Charlie don’t surf,” he said, “an’ he’ll never learn.”

Michonne didn’t have an answer for that and he didn’t expect one, not unless she was gonna say she loved the smell of napalm in the morning or something; it was really Glenn he needed to pick up on things like that and snap back with the right rejoinder. Instead they watched a figure appear at the end of the street, immediately identifiable by its purposeful, slightly bowlegged stride, and soon Rick was rounding the path and coming up to join them.

“What’s so funny?” he demanded, all clean-shaved and square-jawed, and Daryl wished he still looked like Moses leading the Israelites through forty years of desert.

“I take it everything was quiet?” Michonne said, accepting the black Glock Rick slapped into her palm for the changing of the guard.

“Yeah, just some kids, trying to light the rubbish heap on fire,” Rick said, shaking his head slightly.

Daryl sneered, elegantly as he could around the new cigarette he was lighting up. Carl would never pull a dipshit move like that, risk a conflagration taking down the whole town, and what good would their precious walls be then? Him and Carl spent a good amount of time together these days, cos Carl was a pupil actually worth teaching, and for better or for worse Carl was taking after him, bored and claustrophobic and eager to stick his knife in something, _anything,_ so long as it went in with a satisfying thwack and left a decent pile of gore.

Course, he mighta been avoiding Carl the last day or two, ever since the kid cornered him behind the house and, shamefaced and blushing but determined as all hell, started asking him _things,_ questions like _how old were you when you, you know, did it_ and _what exactly is third base_ and when Daryl grunted and cleared his throat and said _why dontcha ask yer dad this shit,_ Carl had screwed up his face in horror, _no, no way, ewww, and anyway, why can’t I ask you, you’re my dad’s…_ and he’d shuffled his feet, suddenly unable to meet the bright, curious eyes of Rick’s too-damn-sharp-for-his-own-good son, and then Carl had followed that up with _so, what do guys_ do _, anyway_ and Daryl had choked on his own spit and said _fucken hell, kid, that’s a question for another day._

“What are you thinking?” Rick said, and Daryl snapped out of his reverie only to realize Michonne was halfway down the path and they were alone now.

“Gave your kid a rundown of the bases the other day,” he said. “Told him he’d best be stickin to first.”

Rick nodded. “I’ve seen him around with that-…”

“Enid,” Daryl supplied. He’d sworn this wasn’t gonna be like the prison, he wasn’t gonna get to know all these names just so they could run through his head on infinite loop after they were dead, but he couldn’t help it, it was like osmosis, you teach someone how to handle a gun or throw a knife, and suddenly they’re _there_ , you can’t lose em in a crowd anymore.

“Enid.” Rick weighed the name on his tongue. “How does she seem to you, does she seem-”

“She’s a girl.” He shrugged. “Good a place to start as any. But Christ, Rick, you musta done a spotty job with the basics, cos yer kid asked me _what guys do._ ”

“Did you tell him?”

“Hell no, that’s your job.” Sometimes, when he looked at Rick out of the corner of his eye, he could see a composite of selves rippling across the familiar features. The cop duds reminded him too much of a blistering rooftop in Atlanta, the empty handcuffs, the severed hand, the spatter of blood. He’d been trying not to cry, face screwed up in grief and rage, howling like a wounded animal, looking from face to pitiless face. Sure they had a point, Merle had been a nuisance and a loose cannon, and now they had to contain the equally dangerous younger brother with homicide in his eyes. Smooth-jawed Officer Friendly had regarded him coolly, dispassionately, and it was right there on his face: _your brother deserved what he got._

“Hey.” Rick was regarding him intently; there was nothing indifferent in those bright cerulean eyes now. “You okay?”

“Well I’m still here, aint I Kojak?”

Rick didn’t look particularly reassured. A couple weeks back he got it into his head that Daryl had lit out when he came home and found Daryl’s downstairs bedroom inhabited by Morgan, and gone into such a panic that he never even noticed the small pile of threadbare flannel shirts dumped negligently on his own bed upstairs. Then Daryl came walking down the street with Glenn like nothing had happened (cos it hadn’t) and Rick gave him such a _look_ that he felt a jolt of vertigo, just like in the early days back at the prison.

(Rick had first taken him into his arms the night before Merle died, waited for him to flinch and stiffen and finally relax into the idea of being held. They breathed together. Slowly his body shifted to accommodate the contours of Rick’s, and with a gasping little sigh he’d let his head fall back to rest against Rick’s shoulder. Rick laced his hands tightly round his middle and Daryl tried to understand what he was offering, what he was asking for. Then Merle’s raised voice had echoed down the cellblock and he disengaged, but he knew his eyes were alight with same curiosity and promise as Rick’s when he glanced back over his shoulder.)

Christ, this place, making him doubt Rick and Rick doubt him. That was the trouble with sivilization, it drew a line twixt the Tom Sawyers and the Huck Finns and made like they couldn’t go home at the end of the day and reconcile their differences same as they’d always done, without much talking.

But that weren’t fair to Rick cos he was about to go full-on Huckleberry and no two ways round, Rick was gonna hate it.

“I wanna do a scouting run,” he said. “Just me. No fuss. No engagement. No action. Reconnaissance-purpose only, see how close these Wolves are gettin.”

Rick reacted as predicted. “No. No. Absolutely not. Not after what happened last time.”

“Last time was different. Didn’t know the enemy. Now we do. ’Sides, I’m better on my own.”

“Tell me the truth.” Rick fixed him with the Grimes stare. “You wanna do this cos you think we’re in danger, or because you’re goin stir-crazy?”

 _Both._ Daryl thought back to that very morning, another tedious firearms lesson in the main square, instructing a kid couple years older than Carl and twice as thick, the kid moaning that the revolver was too heavy; _take it up with Mr. Smith an’ Mr. Wesson_ Daryl had snapped _now hold your goddam wrist steady_ , earning himself a look from Glenn and a stifled chuckle from Abraham. 

“We’re sittin ducks,” he said at last. “You know as good as me no wall holds forever.”

Rick would let him go; Daryl saw the resignation on his face even as he carried on arguing for another couple minutes while Daryl finished his cigarette and picked the scab on his knee til it bled.

“When are you leaving?” Rick said at last.

“Right now,” Daryl said. “Just waitin for you to get back.”

“You can’t wait til tomorrow? There’s only a couple hours of daylight left.”

“Now.” Daryl kicked the pack waiting by his feet. “No sense dawdlin, you know light, dark don’t make much difference to me.”

“But…” _Stay the night_ Rick was urging _come to bed with me first_ but Daryl wasn’t gonna be suckered. He knew the kind of sex Rick wanted, urgent, desperate _goodbye_ sex with its frantic memorizing of flesh under fingers, sensations maximized and filed away for safekeeping, so if Daryl never came back there would be something to cling to _well at least we said our goodbyes._ He wasn’t buying it. Too much like being a guest at his own funeral.

“I’ll come back,” he said. _I always do. Whether it’s climbin out a ravine with a hole in my side or savin your ass at the fences or tryna barter my sorry life for yours, aint nuthin gonna stop me._  

He’d planned it to happen this way, out in the open, so the most Rick could do was clutch his shoulder and bring their foreheads together. But Rick managed to sneak a hand under his shirt and stroke his hip, too. Daryl bit his lip; not like he _enjoyed_ these moments but Rick came out of every goodbye looking like he’d gone ten rounds with Muhammad Ali and come off the worse. So Daryl bumped their noses together and disengaged. Then he made for the gate without looking back.

“Daryl-” Rick’s voice wavered and broke.

Nobody had ever screamed for him before. When Andrea’s shot grazed his head he dropped like a ragdoll and then the screaming started, Rick’s voice, shouting “No! No! No! Daryl!” Barely conscious, suspended between Rick and Shane, feet dragging in the dirt as they hauled him across the field, it echoed in his ears, the way Rick had cried out. Shane was propelling them forward at a brutal pace that sent knives of agony down his side. His head bounced against Rick’s shoulder and the sensation of all those arms round him was suffocating.

They heaved him onto a bed and Hershel’s face swam into view. “Son?” he said. “Son, can you hear me?”

 _I aint your son_ , he tried to say, _aint nobody’s,_ but all that came out was a sort of hoarse grunt.

“He’s still with us,” Hershel said. “Everybody out. Maggie – hot water. Patricia – my kit.”

Another whirl of activity. He must have blacked out again for a while, then a door slammed shut and it got quieter.

“Rick, hold him down.” That was Hershel’s voice. “Shane, take that knife there and cut his shirt off him.” He felt the blade slicing through the thin fabric of his singlet, and the synapses fired all at once, jolting his dulled brain into alertness. _Shirt. Back. Scars. Shane._ He reared back, feeling his elbow collide with someone’s head, and a grunt of pain. Another blow and he sent Rick crashing into the dresser. Glass shattered. He scrambled to his knees and looked around wildly for the next attack, but he was too slow. Shane had him in a headlock and he clawed uselessly at the immovable arm pressing across his windpipe. “Get yer filthy hands offa me you sonuvabitch, I’ll rip yer fucken head off.”

“Shane, let him go.” That was Rick.

“He’s an animal.” That was Shane, the bastard. “We oughta knock him out and tie him to the bed.”

He snarled and twisted furiously, but Shane was cutting off his air and dark spots were appearing before his eyes.

When he came to, it was just Rick and Hershel, and he was telling them he had to get back out there, he was _so close_ to finding that little girl –

“Have you seen yourself, son?” That was Hershel, son-ing him again, making him want to throw every cuss word he knew in the stern old man’s face. “You can’t even see straight, let alone-”

“Enough. Daryl, you’ve gotta let Hershel clean you up. You’re bleeding through.”

He looked down and saw blood leaking through his improvised bandage, staining the quilt below. Hurt like a motherfucker too. He hesitated. Shane was gone. He knew folks like Shane, had known em all his life. The toughs, the knuckleheads, the ones you couldn’t show any sign of weakness or they’d be on you like a swarm of bees. Rick was different, sure, but he wasn’t gonna open up to him like a priest at the confessional just so him and Shane could laugh about it later.

“Don’t touch me,” he warned them again.

“Is there something you’re not telling me? Rick’s brows came together and he was talking in his cop voice again. “Are you bit? Scratched? I know you met walkers, you had their ears around your neck like a – _are you bit_?”

“Aint bit.”

“If you’re bit, we’ll figure something out, but you gotta tell me the truth, Daryl, did one of them –”

“No, I fucken told ya, I aint bit! ‘M fine. Don’t need you fussin over me –”

But Rick had him by the shoulders, locking him into a sort of bear hug as he pulled at his shirt. He scrabbled at Rick’s chest but couldn’t get his arms free to fight him off. Rick ripped the shirt off his body and seconds later his grip slackened and he took a step back. He’d seen.

And Daryl folded. Drained, he slumped back against the pillows. “Do what you gotta.”

“Hershel.” Rick cleared his throat. “Can you give us a minute?”

“Keep him quiet,” the old man warned. As he walked to the door, his brows contracted. Their eyes met and Daryl looked away before he could see any pity in Hershel’s face. The door closed quietly behind him.

He waited for Rick to break the silence. “You’re not bit,” he said.

“Nope.”

“I – I didn’t know. If I had, I wouldn’ta – ”

“Just doin your job,” he said tiredly.

“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

“Wasn’t plannin on it.”

“I’m sorry,” Rick had said.

 

xxx

 

He didn’t know this land like he knew Georgia but he’d got the feel of it quick anyway. When he told Beth he’d never been outta Georgia he was paying lip service to what didn’t exist anymore – borders, divisions, lines on a map. He wasn’t stupid, he didn’t think the sun rose in the west once you crossed the state line into South Carolina. It was more the _concept_ of Georgia he was hung up on, and how his own identity was tangled up with it, like a persistent strain of weed indigenous to those rolling red hills. But, as it turned out, weeds like him could survive almost anywhere.

He moved silently through the trees, alert to the slightest disturbance. The sun slanted through the branches overhead, dappling the undergrowth with golden spots. Relieved to be just him, circling the town in ever-widening arcs until he left his hunting grounds behind and started trekking through unfamiliar terrain.

Maggie had taken him aside not long after he returned with Aaron and Morgan. _Rick started losing his mind again without you._ As close as any of their people got to addressing what neither he nor Rick acknowledged to anyone but themselves.  Meeting his eyes and then looking down apologetically. _There was a woman…_

He never confronted Rick about it. _A blip on the radar_ Maggie called whatever had transpired in his absence, _he didn’t know what he was doing_ , and Rick clung tighter than a barnacle these nights like he was afraid Daryl would wash away at high tide.  

Maybe Rick couldn’t get the white picket fence thing out of his system any more than Daryl could expunge the wildness in his, maybe there was something immutable about human nature that way. Like the Alexandrians, soft and compliant and _just not up to it_ , Charlie don’t surf though he’s got a gun, Charlie don’t surf an’ you know that it aint no good. Daryl had learned to accept half-measures a long time ago.

A red sun sank below the trees and the air grew cooler. 


	2. Something We Get From Birth

_I got into my old rags and my sugar-hogshead again, and was free and satisfied._

\- _The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_

 

 

The night Merle died Rick opened the gate and Daryl walked towards him with his whole body inclined forward like gravity had got the best of him at last.

Rick put his hands up and said he was sorry. Daryl imagined slipping his bloody knife between Rick’s ribs, fleeting as a kiss, and watching his eyes widen in shock. Instead he closed the distance between them until their noses were centimeters apart. His hand, the bloody one, curled round Rick’s neck. “Tell me ya weren’t countin on it,” he ground out. “That it weren’t your plan all along, ta have Merle take off an’ get himself killed.”

“I swear to you, that wasn’t my plan.”

He let his hand fall to his side.

Rick looked surprised. “You believe me?”

“Course.” His whole body was heavy, aching. “Aint never had cause to doubt you, reckon I don’t now. Do I?”

“No.”

He set off for the prison without another word. There weren’t many stars out tonight.

Rick followed him to his cell, where he leaned his crossbow against the wall and dumped his jacket on the floor but kept his knife close. When he left the cell Rick was still behind him, trailing him out of the cellblock and down to the showers. His own eyes adjusted to the dark with the ease of a nocturnal predator; he heard Rick shuffling blindly in his wake, feeling his way with a hand against the tiled wall. He was too exhausted to throw him out; besides, the darkness worked like a blindfold. He stripped economically and switched the water on, unable to suppress a faint hiss as the icy spray hit his skin. He braced his hands against the wall, letting the water sluice the blood and filth and sweat from his body. He kept a squint on Rick, made sure the man kept his gaze trained on his feet, not that he could make those out, either.

When he was clean he turned off the water and scrambled wetly into his clothes, cursing softly under his breath when the fabric clung to his damp skin. He gave Rick the slip on his way out, figuring it served him right, but then he had to listen to Rick fumble his way along the corridor and crash full-tilt into a wall, after which he took pity on him, wrapping a calloused hand round his elbow and guiding him forward. He released Rick as soon as they were back in their own cellblock, filled with the familiar sighs and snores and rustlings of the others, none of whom had felt obliged to keep vigil for Merle Dixon. But Rick was still there, Rick who wouldn’t take a hint, Rick who clung to his six like a broken compass, traipsing after him into his cell at the end of the hall and pulling the curtain shut behind him.

“What do you need?”

“Get out.” His throat clenched up tight.

Rick, damn him, didn’t move.

“Rick, get the fuck out.”

The cell was full of moonlight. Rick looked luminous standing there under the barred window, striped with shadows. Him, he felt smudged, like he was bleeding away into the night. Not twenty-four hours ago Rick had taken him into his arms and breathed with him until he quieted; he wasn’t sure what sort of understanding they’d reached except that it felt like an inevitability.

Last night he’d melted like butter. Tonight he was too brittle, he’d break into a thousand pieces if Rick touched him.

“Imma tell you once more. Get the fuck out. Can’t answer for what’ll happen if ya don’t.”

Rick wasn’t budging.

“Fine,” he said, burning with controlled fury. “Have it your way.” He began tearing off his wet clothes, yanking the shirt over his head so violently he heard fabric rip and a button go pinging off into the corner.

That got Rick’s attention. “You’re not cold, taking your clothes off?” he said, sounding almost tentative. Daryl just grunted and collapsed naked onto his bunk, jerking the bedclothes over himself. He watched Rick through slitted eyes, waiting for his move.

Rick was a chess master, always several plays ahead.  

In the end, he wrestled off his boots and perched awkwardly at the foot of the bed. Daryl shrank away from him so there could be no accidental contact between their bodies.

“Tell me,” Rick said, low and gentle.

“He was walkin by the time I got there.” His voice, when he found it, was clipped and abrupt, like his mouth was reluctant to let the words go. “Governor left him to turn. So I put him down.”

“I’m sorry,” Rick said. “You shouldn’t have had to do that.”

“Couldn’t’a been nobody else.”

“Yeah.” But Rick looked away and suddenly Daryl heard his thoughts plain as day, knew that cold, detached part of his brain was measuring, assessing, and finding himself in possession of the advantage: _he got over Merle once before, he can do it again. It’s for the best. I need him at my side if we’re gonna win this. No divided loyalties. I need him angry, angry enough to put the arrow through the Governor’s other eye._

“You sonuvabitch,” he said. Rick flinched, confirming his suspicion. Rick the tactician. He shouldn’t have been surprised. His body was coiling into attack mode, rearing back to strike.

Rick put up a placating hand. “I never wished him dead,” he insisted. “And I’m sorrier than I can say, that you’re going through this.”

But Daryl had seized the neck of his shirt and was hauling him forward so violently that Rick’s legs went out from under him and he was half-sprawling atop Daryl. “Fuck you, Rick,” Daryl hissed, ignoring the solid weight of Rick’s body over his. “Don’t you get it?”

“Get what?” Rick was breathing very rapidly.

Daryl actually _growled_ , a low rumbling deep in his throat. “I came back,” he said fiercely. “I chose you. And-” his fingers tightened on Rick’s shirt, half-strangling him by the sound of Rick’s choked little gasp – “I woulda chose you over Merle, alive or dead, in the end.” And he flung Rick away from him, taking savage pleasure in the heavy thud when Rick’s head smacked against the cement wall.

“An’ aint that the bitch of it,” he continued bitterly. “Soon as I make up my mind to choose you over my own damn brother, I get the bill a’sale handed ta me, gotta kill him myself, my own blood.”

“The Governor killed him,” Rick insisted, wheezing a little. “Not you.”

“Same fucken difference.” Daryl shifted restlessly. “Made my choice a long time ago. Now I’m payin for it.”

Rick’s eyes were so bright. “I won’t let you regret it,” he said quietly. “And I chose you, too. Back at the farm. It was you or Shane and I trusted you. I haven’t looked back.”

“Aint you a peach,” Daryl grunted, still trying to hold himself apart, maintain the distance – physical, psychic, whatever – between them. His heart was hammering in his ribs.

“I’m your blood now,” Rick told him. “And you’re mine. There’s no me without you, Daryl.”

Fuck and wasn’t that just the damn kicker, cos there was no Daryl without Rick, either. Rick was the anvil for the new self he’d been hammering out so painstakingly over the past year. There was nothing without Rick, no confidence or leadership or forbearance, just a bundle of raw exposed nerves.

Rick was still looking at him and his eyes were gentle now. _Come to me_ those eyes implored, and Daryl didn’t have it in him to keep fighting. The seconds he stalled were just for the sake of his tattered pride, to remind himself that he was a Dixon and Dixons never came easy.

But Dixons never did anything half-assed, either, even if it was liable to get them killed. So when he leaned forward it was deliberate, deliberate when he unclenched his fists from the sheet and let it pool round his waist, deliberate when he tangled his fingers in the curly hair at Rick’s nape and let gravity do the rest.

 

xxx

 

Whole lotta stars out tonight. Perched in a makeshift eyrie at the fork of a mighty oak tree, he scanned above him til he located the hunter, Orion, blazing something fierce in the cloudless sky. He’d always felt a certain kinship with that constellation, ever since he was a kid. Merle used to laugh at him. _You just wait, little brother. All this – gone before ya know it. Satellites gonna make space burn, baby._

No sign of any – hostiles – all day. Just a couple lone walkers, silently dispatched with his knife. If he wanted he could be back in Alexandria before dawn, slide into bed beside Rick, watch his eyes flutter open in surprised delight. But no, he had more miles in him yet, couldn’t risk getting sloppy. Sloppy was the Governor riding up and taking the prison. Sloppy was falling in with the Claimers. Sloppy was…

He still heard it, sometimes, the sound of Beth’s body hitting the floor.

He managed to snag a couple hours of one-eye-open dozing before he dropped from the branches and landed in a half-crouch on the mossy loam below. His shirt caught on a branch and tore, opening a sizable rip down the side. He cursed silently.

He was gnawing a strip of jerky and exploring the dense foliage around the road he and Aaron had taken a few weeks ago when he heard it – a low groan that had him on instant alert, _walker._ He followed the sound to a shallow ditch just off the road, knife at the ready.

But whatever was lying there wasn’t quite dead yet because it raised a bruised and bloody face and looked at him with human eyes. A young man, probly round the age of Deanna’s son. A rough-hewn _W_ peeked out from under the matted thatch of hair over his brow.

Daryl squatted down, the youth’s eyes following his every move. Looked like the kid had taken a couple rounds to the belly; his shirtfront was with stiff with blood.

“You one’a them?” Didn’t bother keeping the distaste from his voice.

“Was.” The youth coughed and blood pooled in the corner of his mouth. “Couldn’t. So they shot me. Left me here.”

“They near?” Daryl didn’t try to staunch the bleeding. No point. He’d be dead in minutes.

“Probly back to base by now.” The kid gasped for breath and Daryl sat back on his heels. Wasn’t exactly good news, but the enemy was still some distance off. He turned his attention back to the kid.

“All of this – why?”

The kid stared at him blankly. Daryl sighed, figuring he wasn’t worth interrogating further, not with his blood soaking into the ground thick and fast.

“How d’you want it?” he said. “I can do it now or after you stop breathing.” He figured the least you could do was let someone choose the manner of his own death, since there wasn’t a whole lot of choice to be had these days.

“I don’t want to die.” The young man was looking at him with wide, terrified eyes.

“Yeah.” He felt detached and shriveled up, the well of his pity run dry a long time ago. The old Rick would’ve held this kid’s hand and sent him off real gentle; the new Rick he wasn’t so sure about. So he sat down in the dirt and crossed his legs, not touching the kid but staying in his line of vision nonetheless.

“Can you do it – after – ?”

“I can do it after,” he said.

“What does – will it…?”

“Dunno,” he said. “Aint never died before.” But that sounded harsh, even to his own ears. “Reckon you won’t feel nuthin,” he said, thinking of the way Merle’s eyes had dimmed and his snarling mouth gone slack. “An’ all this sorry shit-” he gestured at the blood – “it’ll all go away.”

He was gentle, almost reverential, when he put his knife through the young man’s temple a few minutes later. He wiped the blade on the grass and stuck it back in his belt.

 

xxx

 

“I know you’ve seen em,” he said when Rick’s hands ghosted over his scars. “Rather not talk about it.”

“We don’t have to,” Rick assured him. “But I can touch?”

Scar tissue was supposed to be tougher than regular skin, but his scars were rippling and undulatingunder Rick’s fingers like eager cats.

The damn sheet clung to him like a shroud. Skin sticky, sweat trickling down his temple. Thinking _temperature’s a-risin_ , no matter how chilly the prison got at night.

Rick was holding back, careful not to spook him, but Daryl was thinking _fuck it, let the dam in the waters go broke._ Rick’s hand traveled down the ridge of his back, across his scars and down further to grab hold of his ass and pull him forward. Spreading his legs in a blind instinctive caress, disentangling them from the sheet.

When Daryl thought back to that night, as he often did, as he was doing now to avoid thinking about the most recent life he’d dispatched, he often had to hide a smile and cough until the spasm of mirth released him. Because objectively speaking it had been something of a misfire.

The circumstances had been fraught, Merle dead and the threat of war hanging over their heads, and they were going at it with all the desperation of two people who might just be dead tomorrow. Limbs slippery and sweaty, kissing like they’d just invented it, heavy cocks dragging together as they tangled in Daryl’s narrow bunk, first Rick on top then Daryl then Rick again. Goaded beyond the limits of control and realizing too late that they hadn’t talked about it, what would go where and who would do what, dry and parched with nothing slippery except what was leaking onto the mattress below them. In the end it was the friction that did them in, Daryl having wrestled himself on top again and grinding their pelvises together until Rick came with a startled shout. Too late Daryl clapped a hand over his mouth and then Rick actually _licked_ his palm and that was the end of it, he was coming too, months of fleeting glances and touches that lingered a little too long finally culminating in one unglorious, sticky eruption.

Uncharacteristically, it was Daryl who cracked first, collapsing on top of Rick and hiding his burning face against Rick’s shoulder, _shaking_ with suppressed laughter. Daryl, who could count the number of times he’d had sex on one hand and the number of times he’d enjoyed it on zero hands, laughing until he cried that his first proper time had gone so completely balls-up because what the hell, it was still the hottest thing he’d ever known. Finally, Rick, mortified in his own way, had joined in and they’d clutched each other, rocking back and forth in near-hysterical mirth until they practically got each other going again.

“You are fucking – _sexy_ ,” Rick said at last, wiping his streaming eyes. Daryl snorted his derision but couldn’t think of a better word to describe the way Rick looked now with his tangled curls and sleepy, sated eyes. “I’ve never heard you laugh like that.”

He’d never had reason to laugh like that, not in years and years and years.

But then he remembered his brother and felt the creeping chill of being utterly alone in the world.

And Rick felt the chill come over him and pressed his warm chest to Daryl’s flinching back. “Don’t think it,” he said sternly. “Told you – I’m your blood now. Me, and Carl, and Judith – Asskicker that is,” he amended. “Carol, Glenn, Maggie, Hershel, Beth, they’re family too.”

_You lose some_ he thought now, making his solitary way through the trees. _Merle. Hershel. Beth. Tyreese._ Names still too painful to say aloud. _Gain some, too. Like Michonne._ Still making up his mind about some of the others. But damned if Rick’s people didn’t put the Alexandrians to shame, every last one of em.

He wondered what Rick was doing now.

_Aint never had cause to doubt you_ he’d said, so long ago now.

_There was a woman…_

Him and Rick figured it out in no time. The fucking. There was something intrinsic to it. Like muscle memory, albeit a muscle he’d never properly exercised before. He caught on quick, how to thrust and rotate his hips til Rick was panting and groaning and begging for mercy.

It was the same for him, when their positions were reversed. Writhing and begging like no other Dixon had begged before.

When they came together, it was like they were one person.

Instinct had him sending a bolt soaring into the skull of a walker before it had even cleared the trees. The thing fell heavily and he retrieved his arrow, getting himself sprayed with blood in the process. So here he was again, fluttering with rags and wearing walker blood like warpaint. Savage and unsivilized as ever. All he needed was another fucking possum.

A twig snapped and he looked up. Half a dozen little girls, or what used to be girls, in Scout uniforms. His heart sank. _Jesus._

The only mercy was they went down easy. He left them where they fell, averting his face as he pulled out the arrows. His throat was dry, too dry to swallow. He kept walking.

He could see the walls and his heart sank further, even though he knew Rick was behind them. Walking down the street in that place, it was like running a familiar gauntlet. Rick didn’t understand. Dozens and dozens of eyes, eyes like Deanna’s, alight with malice and speculation, so it seemed to him. Whispering when you walked past, snickering behind their hands. Nothing better to do than wonder how your brother got himself locked up again, how your daddy woke up in a ditch with piss in his pants and puke on his shirt, how you got all those bruises on your face and walked with a limp when you turned up at school if you turned up at all. They was the bad uns. The decent uns wondered why you never took off your shirt in front of anyone, why you never shared your bed with Carol even though she would’ve kept it plenty warm for you, why Rick Grimes was the only person you ever –

He shook his head to clear it. That was then. Far as these people were concerned, he didn’t have a history. He didn’t need one. He had one game to play, one game he was certain to win, and that was to be exactly what they hated and feared, the ill-mannered chainsmoking redneck who could pick them all off in their sleep but couldn’t recite the goddam alphabet. He took savage pleasure in it, because ugliness was a kind of power, even though it made him feel tired and ramshackle like his outlines were rubbing away. Sometimes Rick looked blurry, too.

He sank to the ground and watched the place, watched Sasha replace Morgan in the watchtower, watched the sky turn purple and the shadows lengthen, and still he didn’t move. Not til the light was gone and a sickle moon glinted above did he get to his feet. He whistled up at Sasha and waved to identify himself, then he clambered up and over the wall. No noise, no fuss, just to remind himself how easy it really was, how vigilant they had to be.

He’d have given just about anything to be back at the prison, alone with Rick in a candlelit cell, biting down on his wrist to stifle the sounds of pleasure, praying everyone else was fast asleep. Ironic, wasn’t it, how much freedom he’d had behind bars, while here in this sivilized civilized paradise he was at the end of his rope. He could hardly remember what it felt like.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Everything Will Be All Right in the End?
> 
> I know Rick and Daryl are sexy bastards, but sex is funny and sometimes just doesn't go according to plan ;)


	3. Napalm Star

_Tom Sawyer he hunted me up and said he was going to start a band of robbers, and I might join if I would go back and be respectable. So I went back._

\- _The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_

His feet carried him down the darkened street to the house with the boarded-up window. There was a light in the kitchen. She sat at the table, yellow hair, shoulders slumped, smoking a cigarette.

He watched her a good long time. She hardly moved.

He looked at the broken glass and thought maybe he’d fix it tomorrow, her window with its Rick-shaped hole and husband-shaped hole.

Rick’s house (their house) was completely dark. He could smell himself as soon as he walked inside, the musk of dirt, sweat and forest suddenly discernible in the clean-scrubbed house. Upstairs he tiptoed past the closed door to Rick’s room (their room) and slunk into the shower. Still couldn’t shake the habit of taking his crossbow in there with him. He rested his forehead against the tile and thought back to other showers, the one Rick had watched him take back at the prison, the first one here when he’d finally capitulated and washed his filth down the drain.

Not long after Rick had cornered him and pulled him into the bedroom. When they got out of their shirts the little gasp of shock was mutual. It shouldn’t have been surprising, they had all starved on the road, but there was still a remorseful vulnerability to see each other like this, muscles sitting oddly on gaunt frames, rungs of ribcages exposed and countable. Jeans were kicked aside and protruding hipbones, a matched set like mirror images of each other, were almost obscene. These days Rick looked healthier but Daryl couldn’t stomach it, neither the richness of the food nor the abundance of it. Looking at himself in the fogged mirror he wondered if there wasn’t something grotesque to his leanness, surrounded by such bounty, but then he thought _Charlie don’t surf an’ he’ll never learn_ and figured he was better off. Once all this was taken away from them, and it would be, eventually, he wouldn’t have to tighten his belt like everyone else cos it would already be on the tightest notch.

A quiet tap on the door. “Daryl?”

“Gimme a sec,” he said, pulling on Rick’s sweatpants and wrapping the towel round his shoulders to cover his back. Carl was waiting for him in the darkened hallway and he jerked his head for Daryl to follow him back to his room. The crib next to Carl’s bed was empty, which meant Rick had taken Asskicker in with him tonight. He wasn’t gonna waste his breath asking the kid why he wasn’t asleep; he just leaned against the wall and folded his arms. “Yeah?”

Carl was sitting on his bed looking mulish. “You didn’t tell me you were going outside.”

“It was just a quick run. No risk.”

“There’s _always_ risk,” Cart told him sternly, sounding like his father.

“You pull me outta the bath to lecture me?”

“No. Jesus.” Carl glared down at the floor. “You should’ve said bye to me is all.”

He shook his head. Rick, Carl, everybody was so hung up on this idea of goodbyes. Treated em like some sacred ritual, goodbye sex, goodbye handshake, a whole fucken goodbye tour every time you left. He’d never seen the point. Beth hadn’t either.

“You weren’t round the house,” he said.

“So go find me, asshole.” Daryl raised his eyebrows; Carl didn’t usually get mouthy with him. “It would’ve taken like five minutes.”

“Didn’t seem necessary.”

“Yeah, but it’s _what we do_ ,” Carl said forcefully. “My dad wouldn’t leave without seeing me.”

“He’s your dad.”

Carl made a frustrated sound and punched the mattress. “I know you give a shit about us, Daryl.”

That threw him and he lost the thread of the argument. He looked at Carl quizzically, pulling the damp towel tighter round his shoulders.

“So why do you pretend like you don’t? Parents don’t just _leave_ without saying anything.”

_I aint yer dad, an’ I sure as hell aint yer mom_ the cold part of his brain said rhetorically, but he batted that aside, knowing it was just the old fears talking. He looked deeper and saw a different kind of fear, a vision of ironed shirts and starched collars, of cutting crusts off peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and packing brown paper lunch bags, of him and Rick standing in a doorway looking a lot like Aaron and Eric waving goodbye to Carl and Judith as they climbed aboard a big yellow school bus. He cringed. “I aint much of a domestic,” he said.

“Dude,” said Carl, rolling his eyes, “I _know._ ”

Daryl glared. _Who ya callin ‘dude,’ brat_?

Carl blushed. “What I’m trying to say is, like… I know what you are to my dad. I know he loves you and you love him, even though things have been weird since we got here and my dad acted like a jackass while you were gone.”

Carl was still blushing and Daryl felt his cheeks beginning to heat up too. But, Rick-style, the kid held up a hand to keep him from opening his mouth.

“And like, Judith and I love you and you love us, so you should do the stuff people do when they love each other, which is like saying bye and stuff. Even if you think it’s dumb.”

“Okay,” he said quietly.

“ _Okay_?” Carl was still keyed up, hankering for a fight.

“Yeah.” He still didn’t get it, not quite, how a goodbye was sposed to help him sleep any easier. But the rules changed in a place like Alexandria, you had to exert yourself in ways that went beyond survival. Love wasn’t just something you felt, something you showed when you saved someone’s life or shared your food when they were hungry. There were less ways to show it (prove it, affirm it) when you were living easy, so you had to talk about it, too, to remind yourself it was still there.

And he’d never been much good with words.

It dawned on him then, it crashed over his head like a ton of bricks, that maybe all this time Rick had just been waiting for him to say something.

“Daryl?” Carl was looking at him, wide-eyed and worried.

(Sometimes he covered his tracks too well, afraid to yield so much as a foothold.)

“I love ya, kid,” he said, embarrassed and clumsy but determined to make right by him.

“I know,” Carl said smugly.

And there was an awkward pause, awkward for Daryl at least, while he picked at his ragged cuticles and looked anywhere but at Carl.

“We’re cool now?” Carl broke the silence. He nodded. _Cool._ “So I can ask you stuff?”

“What stuff?” he said suspiciously.

“So, not like with you and my dad, but like with _guys_ , does one of them have to be like the girl, or – ”

“ _Fuck_!” he all but shouted, mortified, ready to renounce the parenting thing then and there. “Aint no fucken _girl_ an’ I toldja to ask yer dad if you wanted to know what went where.”

“I don’t _wanna_ know about you and my dad!” Carl yelped back in equal horror. “I don’t know what you’ve – I was just saying, if there was like a girl – ”

“If you wanna ask about women just ask,” Daryl mumbled. “Aint like I never, back in the day - …”

“So,” said Carl, red as a tomato but with an eager gleam in his eye, “so – ”

“ _Later_ ,” Daryl said firmly, thinking he’d have to get himself, hell, both of them, proper drunk first. “I gotta talk to your dad now.”

“Yeah,” Carl smirked. “ _Talk._ ”

Daryl flipped him off and got out of there. Kid was wrong, though, with his sly innuendos. Him and Rick, they did need to _talk_ , and not as a euphemism for nuthin else either. Because pacing up and down the hallway now, avoiding the boards that creaked, he was wondering if _he_ hadn’t driven Rick away with his silences, his sulks, his sullen despondency. That maybe it hadn’t just been Daryl needing Rick in this strange new environment but Rick needing Daryl, too.

_I moved my stuff to his bedroom. That’s gotta count for something, right?_

Sure, and he’d fucked him a few times too. But now he couldn’t remember if he’d bothered to say goodbye before him and Aaron went on their run.

Fuck.

And sure, he’d tried to pull himself together and make an effort since they got back. But maybe Rick didn’t find his new posturing, insolent and cocky, any less off-putting. Maybe it took him back to the day they met, when he stared at Daryl down the barrel of his python and saw nothing but hostility.

Weren’t nuthin cute nor charmin bout it neither, like playin Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn to entertain the sivilized folk. If he’d started seeing Officer Friendly, no doubt Rick looked at him and saw something equally disagreeable.

Regression went both ways.

Fuck.

_There was a woman…_

Well, he couldn’t fucking blame him, could he?

(He could, but maybe not quite so much as before.)

 

xxx

 

“Rick,” he said, banging into the bedroom. “Get up.”

“Daryl? Is that you?”

“Course it’s me, how many late night visitors d’ya get?” He pawed through the chest of drawers until he found a clean set of clothes. He pulled them on and turned round to see Rick propping himself up on an elbow and staring at him groggily, like he wasn’t sure if he was awake or not. “C’mon, get!” he urged, snapping Rick with his damp towel.

He went to the crib, where Asskicker had pulled herself up and was rattling the bars. “Dare!” she cried. “Dare!”

“Hey sweetheart.” He picked her up and buried his nose in her flaxen hair, inhaling that sweet baby scent of buttermilk and flowers. “Hey lil darlin.”

“What the hell’s going on?” Rick sounded thoroughly disoriented. “Is something wrong?”

“Nah, nuthin’s wrong.” He bounced Asskicker on his hip. “Just need ya to get up, is all.”

Rick’s hair was flattened on one side and his cheek still bore the imprint of the pillow. Tousled and puffy-eyed, in nothing but his boxers, he looked small and vulnerable. Daryl wavered; he _could_ just crawl in bed with the man, kiss him back to sleep and have their chat in the morning.

“Move your ass.” He was talking to himself as much as Rick. “We’re goin out.”

Rick finally levered himself up, groaning. He tried to pull Daryl into him but Daryl danced back, keeping the baby between them, too abuzz on nerves and adrenaline. “Just get your clothes on.”

He swept off with Judith, leaving Rick to fumble around (he heard him stub his toe on something and swear violently) as he went back down the hall and rapped on Carl’s door. “Take your sister,” he said when the kid opened the door. Judith squawked indignantly as she was transferred arms and he kissed her forehead, gently untangling her fat little fingers from his hair.

“Alone time?” Carl said, leering at him.

“Brat, you got it comin and you best pray I aint the one ta give it to ya,” he threatened, wondering who was responsible for dragging Carl’s mind through the gutter. Michonne, probably.

Back down the hall and he found Rick pulling on his boots, moving like molasses. He was awake enough to look wary now, and Daryl couldn’t blame him.

The cool night air seemed to revive Rick some. Daryl hustled him down the street and he scanned the darkened houses as if they held a clue to why he’d been so unceremoniously dragged out of bed. “You just get back?” Daryl nodded. “See anything?”

“Few walkers. Bagged me a Wolf, sort of.” He told Rick about the young man he’d found. Didn’t mention the Girl Scouts.

“We going outside the wall?” Rick asked when they reached the end of the street.

“Nah.” There was no one about so twined his fingers with Rick’s (Rick squeezed back urgently) and led him along the wall and up the stairs to the watchtower. Sasha was still up there, leaning against the railing, shotgun braced against her shoulder. He whistled and she swung round, leveling the gun. “Easy.” He nudged the muzzle down so it wasn’t pointing at his heart.

She still looked grey, Sasha, and bitterness had scored two deep lines round her mouth. He had a matched set, so did Maggie and all of them, but Sasha didn’t have Glenn or Rick to coax a smile to her face. She was as alone as he’d ever been, and he’d’a pitied her if she let him. But she didn’t so he just gave her a nod. “I’ll take the watch.”

“You and Rick?” Her voice was flat.

“Yeah. You go on, get some sleep.”

She gave him a look that said _fat fucking chance_ and turned to Rick. “One of these times he won’t come back,” she said dully. “You know that, don’t you?” Then she handed Daryl the gun and disappeared down the stairs.

“Is she right?” Rick gave him a searching look that had him rocking to and fro on his heels, nervously tugging at his forelock. He was bracing himself to talk, to make one of those speeches he so hated making, something that exceeded two or three sentences and had “love” in it somewhere. But what came out of his mouth was something else entirely.

“You shoulda fixed her window,” he said.

“Sorry?” Rick said.

“Jessie. Somebody shoulda fixed her window. Aint right, leavin it like that all these weeks.”

Rick looked nonplussed. “Daryl –”

“Aint like she some sorry whore that y’all’s gotta turn your back on and let fend for herself. Don’t fucken blame _her_.”

“ _What_? I never –”

“No. You never.” He took up Sasha’s position at the railing, staring out into the night. He was angry, he realized, at himself or Rick or both he didn’t know but his hair was on end and his hands were bunching into fists. “You killed her husband, Rick. You owe her.”

“Not as much as I owe you.” Rick came to stand beside him but he didn’t turn his head. “Don’t owe her my life, for one thing. Or my children’s lives.”

“If that’s what’s keepin ya, I reckon we’re square. Absolved. Go on, if ya want.”

“I don’t want.” Rick shifted so their shoulders brushed. “Only you.” He grabbed his arm, forcing Daryl to look at him. “Don’t tell me I don’t know my own mind, because I do.”

“What happened then?” He pulled away. “Didn’t stop you gettin cozy.”

“You were gone. I missed you. And she…”

“She what?”

“She… smelled like you.”

A startled bark of laughter escaped him. “The fuck, Rick? You sayin the woman stank like gasoline an’ worse?”

“ _No._ She… I caught her smoking once, when she thought nobody was looking. I smelled it on her and it made me think of you.”

“Jesus, Rick.”

“I don’t care for her like that. I never did. For a second she… smelled right, and she was _there._ She was kind to me when you – you were outside on the porch, not talking to anybody, gutting your polecat –”

“ – possum –”

“ – and then you _left_ like we were _nothing_ , you and me _._ Like you didn’t _love_ – I was weak, I needed somebody, and she was there.”

“But she didn’t want ya.” It was a taunt.

“She knew better. Knew I was trying to make up for something else.”

“Yeah?”

“And then I… woke up. I’m sorry, Daryl.” Rick hung his head, abject.

He reckoned the first time anybody had ever apologized to him was Andrea, when she apologized for shooting him. _We’re good_ he told her, giving her the terse benediction of his forgiveness, and she’d smiled like that meant something too. He hadn’t realized there was power in forgiveness.

“Aint got nuthin ta apologize for,” he said now. _Aw come on_ the part of his brain that was Merle said _be a man_. He backtracked. “I mean, ya do. You were a selfish prick an’ I aint the only one you should be apologizin to.”

“I know.” Rick was still looking down. “But I did worse by you, and –”

He sighed heavily, cutting him off. “Maybe if we was other people in another time I’d make ya sweat it. But hell, we could be dead tomorrow, an’ if you’re sorry, you’re sorry, an’ I’ll take it.”

Rick mumbled something that sounded a lot like _thank god._ He lurched forward but Daryl dodged him.

“Wait,” he said. “Aint finished. Don’t… distract me.” He still had his own apology to render and apologies never came easy to him, it was like dredging up something painful and heavy from the depths of his soul.  “It was me, too. I wasn’t there for ya. ’M sorry. ’M here now.”

Rick knew what apologies cost him. He stepped into his space and Daryl felt the whisper of lips across his temple. Then he pushed Rick away again.

“You know me, I’m shit with words, don’t like talkin if I can help it. Had other ways to make it clear how I felt about you, didn’t I?”

“You did.” Rick smiled. He was still close enough for Daryl to feel the heat from his body.

Daryl brushed his thumb across Rick’s lower lip and forged on. “But in here… realized I aint got so many ways ta show you, not behind the walls, an’ me goin outside without ya.”

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Rick said quickly. “I told you, it was me, I was stupid –”

“Me too,” Daryl insisted, running out of steam but trying to keep himself talking. “You worried maybe I changed my mind. An’ I never thought, maybe you needed to hear me say it.” 

“What did you want to say?” Rick’s eyes were very warm and Daryl knew he was being teased. But he still had to say it aloud to make it count.

“That I still love you. Aint nuthin ever gonna change that.”

They stared each other. Time stopped, then sputtered back to life.

“How come you brought me all the way up here to tell me?” Rick wanted to know.

He shrugged. “Thought it’d be like old times, back at the prison, jus’ you an’ me again.” 

Rick pulled him close and Daryl gave in at last, sagging against him and resting his chin on Rick’s shoulder. “Do I tell you too often?” Rick said. “That I love you? Maybe I use words too much and they start to lose their meaning.”

“No,” Daryl said fervently, clutching at the fabric of Rick’s jacket, “they don’t.”

“So you don’t mind if I say it now?”

“Fuck, no.”

“I love you, Daryl,” Rick told him.

And that was it, he was gonna kiss Rick right then, except he remembered one last thing. He pulled away and jabbed his finger into Rick’s chest. “Let’s get one thing straight,” he said. “They aint never gonna sivilize me.”

“God, I hope not,” Rick said, and took his breath away.

Daryl kissed him back, putting everything into it. Joy chased away the bleakness, building up in his chest til he thought he might explode from it. They were clicking back into place, him and Rick, he could feel it in the way Rick’s hands glided into his hair, the way their hips aligned and Rick’s knee nudged between his, the way their tongues prodded and teased and explored anew. He could feel it in the way every inch of his scarred, tattooed hide suddenly felt smooth as silk.

Rick was square where Daryl was sharp and triangular. He curled his fingers round that strong, square jaw and felt Rick’s hands roaming over his cheeks, his neck, his jutting clavicle.

They toppled to the ground, each trying to cushion the impact for the other, managing only to bruise Daryl’s elbows and scrape Rick’s knees. Rick moaned a little and then Daryl was rolling him over, trying to hoist him back up.

“What’re you-”

Rick was on his feet again, looking confused, but then Daryl was jerking his belt out of its loops and sinking to his knees before him.

“Daryl, oh my god.”

Daryl had rules, he’d made that clear from the beginning. He would only fuck face-to-face, he’d never take Rick or let Rick take him from behind. What exactly he was afraid of he never told Rick, couldn’t put into words for himself, really, except that a faceless back became a nameless terror and he needed Rick’s eyes to anchor him, keep him in the here and now. Another rule, he’d never get on his knees, not for Rick, not for nobody. Get Rick stretched out on the bed and he’d suck him off til he was blue in the face, but power was a tricky thing and –

His knees creaked when they hit the ground. He quickly undid Rick’s jeans and tugged them down round his hips. He chanced a peek up at Rick through his lashes and met his startled eyes, before guiding Rick’s cock into his mouth and swallowing him down deep.

Half a minute into it, bobbing and sucking with spit leaking down his chin, he realized he didn’t _feel_ powerless, not at all, not with the sound of Rick’s ragged breathing above him, Rick’s fingers clutching desperately at his hair, Rick’s hips thrusting weakly –

So he opened his eyes again and looked up at Rick. Rick made a choked little sound when their eyes locked and Daryl relaxed his throat, letting Rick fuck his mouth, and it was okay, it was _more_ than okay, they were looking at each other and it didn’t matter if they were horizontal or vertical because it was just the two of them like always.

It felt like _sorry_ , and it felt like _I forgive you._

“Daryl –” Rick made a strangled sound and stumbled back, his dick sliding out of Daryl’s mouth. “Wait, wait, stop…”

“What?” Daryl sat back on his heels and swiped the saliva from his chin defensively. “I do somethin wrong?”

“No, god no, that was – I just…” Rick was back on the ground with him, clutching at his shoulders. “Want you inside me.”

“You sure?” They weren’t childish enough to keep track but he was also pretty damn sure it was Rick’s turn, if you could call it a _turn_ , because truth be told once they were together he could scarcely tell who was doing what, it was like the movement of one body, giving and taking and remaking itself over and over.

“Certain.”

Rick eased him down and mouthed at his erection through his jeans. He made a small, inarticulate noise and bit down on Rick’s neck. Suddenly glad to be alive, thinking it was more than just a habit, it was an addiction, what they were together–

Then Rick moved up to kiss him and it detonated like an IED, Rick’s mouth hard on his, their teeth colliding with the force of impact. Daryl tasted blood and felt Rick’s tongue flick against his split lip and he fought back, jamming his own tongue into the other man’s willing mouth. They jostled for control but this time it was him what finally sighed and eased back, turning the kiss into a shallow, open-mouthed thing. He felt Rick relax into him. He traced the outline of Rick’s mouth with his tongue, teasingly, and Rick smiled.

He unbuttoned his own shirt first and Rick kissed the scar over his chest. _I’m sorry._

_I know_ he said.

They kicked the rest of their clothes aside. Caution thrown to the winds. He wanted _all_ of Rick tonight and he would brand Rick’s body with the terrible power of his forgiveness and he would give Rick all of him, too, so there was no chance of forgetting.

Rick stared unabashedly as he pulled off his jeans and licked his lips when he saw he had nothing on underneath. He went in for Rick’s left nipple, dragging it between his teeth, while Rick latched on to the _x_ tattooed over his collarbone.

Which was all well and good, but at this rate they’d be here when the sun came up.

He maneuvered Rick onto his back. The man was disarmingly complacent with his clothes off, spreading his legs immediately and just smiling up at him.

But Daryl saw a challenge in that easy smile and set about opening Rick up the filthiest way he could think of, with his tongue. Rick cried out in shock; he’d never done that before. But a spirit of recklessness possessed him tonight and soon Rick was digging fingers into his shoulders, half-sobbing as Daryl worked his tongue through that sensitive ring of muscle.

It was his turn to be shocked when Rick hauled him up and kissed him just as filthily, heedless of where his mouth had been. He felt himself dissolving but had the presence of mind to slip his fingers into Rick, one at a time, til Rick was pushing back and groaning into his mouth.

“How d’you want it?” he growled, the same question he’d asked the dying Wolf in the woods.

“Hard,” said Rick, a glutton for punishment.  

“Imma give it to ya sweet, then,” he whispered, cos Rick wasn’t a dying man and this wasn’t his dying wish.

He slid into Rick, inch by excruciating inch. Suspended above him, burying his cock deep in Rick’s tight heat, gazing down at his pale face in something like awe.

You could glimpse paradise if you leaned close in the dark.

With his first long, languorous thrust, Rick inhaled sharply and tipped his head back. “Look at me,” Daryl commanded, and Rick obeyed. Blue met blue, Rick’s wide and starry, Daryl’s narrow and watchful. “Want you to keep your eyes open, if ya can.”

_You’re mine._

Rick nodded.

Daryl felt Rick’s fingers stroking his back, running over his scars as they moved together. Rick was writhing beneath him, cursing under his breath, and he was speeding up in spite of himself, working his fist along Rick’s cock, thoughts of slow and sweet flung to the breeze as he fucked him hard and fast. It was overpowering, his cock clutched tight in Rick’s body, the hands reading history on his back, the blue eyes boring into his. “I’m fucking you,” he heard himself saying, “so you’ll stay fucked for a good long time.”

Rick just growled his name.

Riding waves of pleasure, they were outside time, with no memories and no future. Naked howling freedom, that’s what it was, obliterating sensation.

He had never come with his eyes open before. He’d thought it was like sneezing, where your eyes slammed shut of their own accord. But then Rick’s cock was pulsing in his hand and Rick was looking up at him and _sobbing_ with the effort of keeping his eyes open as he emptied himself between them. And it had his eyes running over, too, when he came inside Rick moments later, and then they were kissing and salty wetness was everywhere.

“Aint cryin,” he said when he got his breath back. “Jus’, y’know.” He hauled Rick’s head up to have a good look at him. Rick looked wrecked, sure, but calm and happy and _Rick_ again, not Tom Sawyer or Officer Friendly or anybody else he shouldna been. So he kissed him with his eyes open.

Some time later Rick looked down at the purple bite mark above his left nipple and laughed. “Wild as the day you were born,” he said ruefully. “They’ll never get you now.”

They still had to wait out the rest of Sasha’s watch. Daryl was desperately tired. His body ached and his eyes felt full of grit. Bundled back into his clothes, he slumped against Rick.

“Go home,” Rick told him. “Rest.”

He shook his head. “Stayin with you.” He slid down to the floor and stretched out, lighting a cigarette and tucking an arm behind his head. He stared up at the sky. Stars burning like napalm above them.

Rick crouched over him. “You and me…”

“We’re good.”

_You sure?_ Rick said with his eyes.

_Yeah I’m sure, now c’mere._

Rick lay down next to him and Daryl showed him where to find Orion, the hunter, in the sky.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Huck Finn is Mark Twain and chapter titles are Apocalypse Now (via The Clash). 
> 
> Thank you for reading, and sticking with, this bleak little outing. Your comments were so kind and encouraging, and I couldn't be more grateful. So I had to give it a (mostly) happy ending!
> 
> (For the record, I hate the concept of Jessie as much as everyone else, but it didn't feel right to scapegoat her in this story. This one was on Rick!)
> 
> I had many doubts along the way with this story, and I'd really love to hear your thoughts.

**Author's Note:**

> Even though this one doesn't have much going for it, there's still a couple chapters to follow. 
> 
> I love it when you talk to me.


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